Archive for February, 2012

February 29, 2012

JAY LENO ON ANWR DRILLING: “Leno’s punchline: Democrats say drilling in ANWR wouldn’t produce any oil for 10 years ‘the same point they’ve been making for more than 10 years now.’ President Bill Clinton vetoed legislation in 1995 that would have opened ANWR to oil exploration.” It would be nice to have some extra oil coming on line about now.

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Why is the press so reticent on the international NGO sex-abuse scandals? “Well, one reason is that in many less-developed countries the aid-group staff and the First World journalists are often dating. But you would think that the question of which internationally known ‘humanitarian’ groups has been covering up extortionate sex and child abuse would be at least as important as, say, which energy executives met with Dick Cheney.”

February 29, 2012

BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “Two decades in higher education has taught me this: what most academics say is that they wish to challenge the prejudices of their students. When they really mean to say is that they intend to replace the prejudices of the students with the prejudices of academics.”

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

Last August, while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was in the midst of an intensive round of fundraising for her 2012 reelection bid, a four-year-old civil lawsuit alleging fraud by an education company in which she and her husband are heavily invested became public.

Nationally, most of the coverage of Snowe’s decision to drop her reelection bid has focused on the centrist Republican’s frustration with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill. But in Maine, a few newspapers have speculated that her husband’s legal entanglements had a role in Snowe’s sudden and surprising decision, which left her with more than $3 million in her campaign coffers and her party without a Senate candidate less than three weeks before the filing deadline for Maine’s June 12 primary.

This warrants further attention.

UPDATE: Reader Douglas Bass reads it this way: “It says here that Olympia Snowe is collateral damage in Obama’s war on for-profit education.”

February 29, 2012

CHANGE: Video: We should embrace the Keystone pipeline, says … Bill Clinton. “The route is a secondary concern to hardcore greens. In fact, TransCanada already proposed changing it to avoid the Nebraska Sandhills back when the Keystone issue first blew up. So why is Clinton suddenly pushing this phony argument? Because, silly, he’s read the polls. Heavy majorities support building Keystone, and they’re only going to get heavier as gas prices rise. And it’s not just Republicans: Support among independents is net +39 and even among Democrats it’s net +5. Clinton knows that unless gas prices ease, this issue will become increasingly potent for the GOP, so here he is shoving Obama towards a reversal.”

February 29, 2012

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I guaran-damn-tee you more people just saw this on Instapundit than watch CurrentTV in toto. What could be the damages for slander on CurrentTV? $45.67 plus attorneys fees in the amount $50K.” Heh. If a tree libels in a forest, and no one hears it, has it defamed?

ANOTHER UPDATE: On a related note, reader Jeff Bonwick writes: “In light of the present state of political discourse, I offer you Godwin’s Moore’s Law: the speed with which all dialogue degenerates into Nazi comparisons will double every 18 months.”

February 29, 2012

At the time of the Carrington Event, telegraph stations caught on fire, their networks experienced major outages and magnetic observatories recorded disturbances in the Earth’s field that were literally off the scale.

In today’s electrically dependent modern world, a similar scale solar storm could have catastrophic consequences. Auroras damage electrical power grids and may contribute to the erosion of oil and gas pipelines. They can disrupt GPS satellites and disturb or even completely black out radio communication on Earth.

During a geomagnetic storm in 1989, for instance, Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid collapsed within 90 seconds, leaving millions without power for up to nine hours.

The potential collateral damage in the U.S. of a Carrington-type solar storm might be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in the first year alone, with full recovery taking an estimated four to 10 years, according to a 2008 report from the National Research Council.

Too bad we didn’t put that stimulus money toward hardening infrastructure against this and other disasters or something. But that would have meant too many jobs for burly men, which was politically unacceptable to feminists in the Obama Administration.

February 29, 2012

SO I KEEP HEARING THAT RICK SANTORUM IS LEADING IN TENNESSEE, but I’ve seen exactly one Santorum yard sign and one Santorum bumper sticker in Knoxville. Yeah, I know, that’s not scientific or anything, but still . . . .

Remember that old commercial: “How do you think a man like me got to be a man like me?”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Please don’t use my name…

My wife is an avid couponer, and we fit into the 100,000+ and college graduate categories. I mentioned the story about couponing, and her response was “I have to coupon, we don’t qualify for food stamps!”

Heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Kyle Eubank writes:

It certainly seems that the majority of the time I’m in line at the grocery store behind someone who is paying with an EBT card, that while my cart is filled with generic and store brand items, they will have a cart full of name brand items. If I buy something that is name brand, it’s usually because I have a coupon for it.

And reader Dan Tracy writes:

We are in the $100K+ per year income category, and my wife is a big-time coupon/bargin shopper.

We feed a family of five on $160 to $180 per week for groceries, and not eating junk either…my wife buys a lot of fruits (for snacks) and vegetables, plus organics too (lots of shopping at Trader Joe’s).

$180/week for a family of five works out to $5.14 per day per person. Well below the $7/day limit some Dems denounce as not enough for recipients of gov’t aid.

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

THOUGHTS ON RESPONSIBILITY: “It’s OK to be charitable with your own money. It’s not so virtuous to be generous with other people’s money. A publicly traded business should maximize profits and let shareholders be charitable with those returns if they so choose. . . . there is no such thing as ‘enough’ profit. The world is highly uncertain and sacrificing profits in the name of ‘soft values’ may end up destroying the company and putting everyone out of work.”

UPDATE: Reader Tom Caso writes:

This applies to government as well.

Why is OK for the President to announce a policy of higher taxation on the rich to finance higher handouts based on his view of what Jesus wants, but it is not OK for the Catholic Church to object to financing abortions based on their view of what Jesus wants?

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

IN THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION:Rick Santorum is Right About Higher Ed. “I am not enchanted with Santorum’s tone in these matters, but his points warrant more serious attention than academics are likely to give them. His statements are not just howls of anti-intellectualism or attempts to play to Tea Party resentments. They are part of a cogent view that accurately registers aspects of the dominant campus culture that academics themselves are disinclined to acknowledge, let alone discuss.”

February 29, 2012

It’s not just white people he hates. The Central Valley is heavily Hispanic as well. And one can make the valid point that these policies disproportionately hurts Hispanics since they constitute a significant percentage of the population in the western Central Valley. The type of jobs they garner in the western Central Valley typically are low wage, menial Blue Collar positions. No water, no jobs. Pretty simple. But perhaps, more importantly, the Central Valley is the type of place where people still cling to their guns and religon. Unsurprisingly, POTUS forgets where his organic lettuce, almonds and carrots come from. Similar to the Keystone decision, this is ideology over humans.

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON OUR HOSTAGES IN EGYPT: Egypt Trial Reveals Persistent Anti-Americanism in Government. “This new irresponsibility of the ruling elite meshes with the power struggle under way in Egypt, where being more anti-American than thou is seen as a way to power. It is a cause that can unite Islamists and nationalists, which is important now as the army and Muslim Brotherhood look for ways to work together.”

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

THE ECONOMIST ON CHICAGO: The Capital Of Corruption. “Although Chicago is the capital of corruption, the state of Illinois as a whole ranks only third in the country—after the much more populous states of New York and California. But the report documents a pattern of crime that has become synonymous with the Chicago or Illinois ‘way’ of doing things. All the corrupt governors and 26 of the aldermen had tried to extract bribes from builders, developers, business owners and those seeking to do business with the city or the state. Those who paid bribes either assumed, or were told, that payment was necessary for zoning changes, building permits or any other government action.”

February 29, 2012

PERSONALIZING CANCER DRUGS: “Starting this spring, for about $5,000, any oncologist will be able to ship a sliver of tumor in a bar-coded package to Foundation’s lab. Foundation will extract the DNA, sequence scores of cancer genes, and prepare a report to steer doctors and patients toward drugs, most still in early testing, that are known to target the cellular defects caused by the DNA errors the analysis turns up. Pellini says that about 70 percent of cases studied to date have yielded information that a doctor could act on—whether by prescribing a particular drug, stopping treatment with another, or enrolling the patient in a clinical trial.”

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

LONGEVITY UPDATE: If you’re in the Bay Area on March 31/April 1, you may want to attend my friend Chris Peterson’s Personalized Life Extension Conference. You can get $100 off registration if you use the registration code INSTAPUNDIT.

February 29, 2012

FROM BEN BARTON: Where Supreme Court Justices Come From. The current justices “have spent more pre-appointment time in legal academia, appellate judging, and living in Washington, D.C. than any previous Supreme Court. They also spent the most time in elite undergraduate and law school settings.” And less time practicing law or in politics.

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

BLUE-ON-BLUE: Landrieu blasts Salazar, White House over drilling moratorium. “I know, I know — the White House claims they don’t have any drilling moratorium in place. They claim that they want to increase domestic oil production. As Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) explains to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, their actions don’t match their rhetoric.”

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

Over the years I’ve gradually come to understand that the old model wasn’t just broken by evil corporate greedsters hellbent on pillaging the middle and working classes – not that such people don’t exist and don’t need to be watched. It was being broken from below as much as from above, and the left did as much to dismantle it as the right. The Ralph Nader consumer movement, for example, set about attacking the comfortable corporate oligarchies who sold shoddy goods at high prices to the public (can you hear me, Detroit?). Nader and his followers wanted consumers to have more choices, and they favored competition over monopoly. But it was exactly their ability to sell shoddy products at high prices that made so many American companies so profitable in the golden age of the blue model – and it was those profits that underwrote the wages and benefits that gave blue collar workers lifetime security and middle class incomes. Nader’s attack on corporate oligarchy was blue-on-blue violence.

Consumers wanted better goods and lower prices than the blue model could give them. Savers wanted higher interest rates than the highly regulated blue era banks could give them. Companies and consumers wanted more innovative telecom service at lower prices (and with less arrogance) than Ma Bell was ready to offer. The whole country was fed up with the inconvenient schedules and high prices that came with the oligopolistic air travel market. Individual investors were sick and tired of high trading fees and restricted information in the stock market. And given the choice between a shoddy and expensive American car, an expensive but well made European one, or a cheap and reliable Japanese car, fewer and fewer Americans picked something made in Detroit.

Americans wanted more than the blue model could give them, and increasingly they sensed that they could get it. That, more than corporate plots and Gordon Gekko style misdeeds on Wall Street, is why the blue model is going the way of the mastodon.

February 29, 2012

A NEW WARNING ON STATINS: “It is the first time that the Food and Drug Administration has officially linked statin use with cognitive problems like forgetfulness and confusion, although some patients have reported such problems for years. Among the drugs affected are huge sellers like Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor and Vytorin.”

Try CoEnzyme Q10. In fact, you should probably try it even if you aren’t taking statins.

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

DONALD TRUMP: OPEC Leaders Are Laughing At Us. “‘President Obama has not seen fit for [energy to be] a major agenda. Obamacare was a major agenda,’ said Trump, referring to the president’s health-care plan. ‘If he spent one-third of the effort on energy we wouldn’t even be bringing oil in.’”

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

Those who buy the consensus elite position typically characterize dissenters as “extreme.” In the 60s, the bipartisan consensus elite position on welfare was basically ‘to hell with requiring work. Let’s just give everyone a guaranteed income.’ The extreme position was to oppose this as a “megadole,” as a nutty winger named Reagan put it. When the consensus position proved both wildly unpopular and unworkable, the Reagan position eventually became the new consensus, adopted by not only Republicans but Bill Clinton.

These days, on the budget, the consensus elite position is that you have to both cut government and raise taxes. The “extreme” position is to try cutting government first. Crazy, I know. On immigration, the consensus elite position is that we need to couple border enforcement with a simultaneous amnesty. The “extreme” position is to do the enforcement part first, while avoiding new magnets that might draw further illegal entries. Is that what Brooks means by “beyond the fringe”?

You get the point. Brooks doesn’t like the “heresy trial” that drove Rick Perry from the race merely for invoking the consensus position. But the only way for non-elites to convince elites that they are full of it is to beat them in elections when they invoke the consensus, no?

Elections are so plebeian. And worse, a plebe’s vote counts for just as much as a patrician’s.

February 29, 2012

SPECIAL TREATMENT? Treasury Bent NOL Rules to Provide $26 Billion to AIG. “The tax benefit is notable for more than simply its size. It is the result of a rule that the Treasury unilaterally bent for AIG and several other hobbled companies in 2008 that has largely been overlooked. This rule-twisting could deprive the government of tens of billions of dollars, assuming the firm remains profitable. The tax dodge, and let’s be honest, that’s what it is, also will most likely help goose the bonuses of AIG’s employees, some who helped create many of the problems that led to its role in the financial crisis.”

They told me if I voted for John McCain, stuff like this would happen. And they were right!

February 29, 2012

ANOTHER MILITARY BOOK RECOMMENDATION: John Lucas writes to recommend Platoon Leader by James McDonough. “Jim was my roommate at West Point and is the toughest soldier I ever met. Very good read about a young leader’s experience in Vietnam.”

UPDATE: Reader Dave Parmly writes:

Give me my choice of any combat weapon in the world and I will choose the M-14 every time. They need to use a different kind of Ranger in that park…one with an uppercase R.

For great combat reads I recommend Winston Churchill. 2 free downloadable books are “The River War” (about combat against a Jihadist army in Egypt) and also “The story of the Malakand Field Force” (combat in Afghanistan against a, you guessed it, Jihadi army there. Both of them have many observations that are salient for today. It’s also great writing from a brilliant guy.

February 29, 2012

Meanwhile, my advice is to compete against men. I had a research assistant who did SCA broadsword competition and was really formidable. She came up against a guy who gave her such a buffet that it turned her helmet around backward and knocked her cold. They were married a year later.

February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012

NOT SO BAD: A look at the state of the Anglosphere, from Joel Kotkin and Shashi Parulekar. “It’s indisputable that the Anglosphere no longer enjoys the overwhelming global dominance that it once had. What was once a globe-spanning empire is now best understood as a union of language, culture, and shared values. Yet what declinists overlook is that despite its current economic problems, the Anglosphere’s fundamental assets—economic, political, demographic, and cultural—are likely to drive its continued global leadership. The Anglosphere future is brighter than commonly believed.”

February 29, 2012

MICHAEL BARONE: “I have long been puzzled by the enthusiasm with which many young liberal bloggers cheer on proposals to raise tax rates on high earners. I can understand why they might favor them, but not why they seem to invest so much psychic energy in the issue.”

February 29, 2012

When a decent young man professes a desire to marry an old-fashioned girl and take financial responsibility for his family, Yoffe treats him as a deviant. She denounces him as “sexist” even though he is careful to affirm that women have every right to work outside the home if they choose to do so. He mentions nothing about politics, yet she feels compelled to bring Santorum, the feminists’ Emmanuel Goldstein, into the mix.

Yoffe’s hostility to this young man tells us more about elite culture than it does about her personally. (We’ve met her, and she’s perfectly pleasant.) By his account, his female classmates have been indoctrinated with the same rigid ideas about “sexism” that Yoffe expresses in her response.

February 29, 2012

READER JOHN MARCOUX WRITES: “I went to the Charleston Gun show recently. The crowd seemed unusually large. Turns out it was the biggest crowd ever for a Mike Kent show in his 25 years of doing shows around the southeast, including Asheville and Myrtle Beach.”

February 28, 2012

February 28, 2012

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “Last year we had a panel of bigshot songwriters and entertainment lawyers at the law school, and I was moderator. In an effort to stir up some disagreement (since we had people from both the industry and the artist sides) I suggested that the record industry was vulnerable to racketeering charges. I failed miserably: everyone agreed that I was right.”

February 28, 2012

This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.

February 28, 2012

February 28, 2012

FRACK NATION DOCUMENTARY nears funding goal. “As of today, Ann & Phelim Media has raised $123,090, via 1,731 new subscriber-producers, with 38 days to go, via Kickstarter. We need to keep the momentum up, and the pressure on, because 1) if they don’t get fully funded in the next 38 days, all the money gets returned to the citizen-funders, and 2) it always takes a bit more money to promote a film than anyone thinks, and the finished work has to be pushed out there as aggressively as possible, during this delicate time in our nation’s energy history—particularly if we’re going to truly dig out (or drill out) of this economic quagmire.”

February 28, 2012

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